Running On Fumes

Once-great Indy 500 Still Stuck In Low Gear

May 26, 2000|By Ed Hinton of The Sentinel Staff

INDIANAPOLIS -- The third-biggest race in town this year -- once the biggest race in the world every year -- will be run Sunday.

Anticipation already is electric for the new United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Sept. 24. And NASCAR's Brickyard 400, to be run Aug. 5 with its wealth of star drivers, has been the most popular race here among fans, locally and nationally, for several years now. Tickets and hotel rooms are sold out for both races.

The Indianapolis 500?

"This race is gone, and it ain't ever comin' back!" a professional scalper screamed on the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road, just behind the massive grandstands, as the ticket market crashed on the night before the bottom fell out of the Indy 500 in 1996.

For four years now, that prophecy has held.

It likely will hold for the ages. The Indianapolis 500 never will be motor racing's Mount Olympus again.

Even with complete reconciliation -- and that's highly unlikely -- of parties that have been warring since '96, "It would be very difficult to get the 500 back to the pinnacle where it was," said New York-based sports marketing expert Bill Dyer, former owner of Barnes-Dyer Marketing, which specialized in Indy car racing before the schism.

The Speedway says Sunday's 500 is sold out. But sellouts have been getting softer year by year. The few scalpers who still dare to deal in 500 tickets are taking another bath this time.

By Sunday morning, you can see the Indy 500 cheaper than a movie -- $5 to $10 for seats that only five years ago went for up to $1,000 apiece. And you can book a nice hotel room, or a suite, right now for the weekend.

The best that can be said of the 500 this year is that it at least has a pulse again. Two-time winner Al Unser Jr. is back after a five-year absence -- four of them as part of the boycott by Championship Auto Racing Teams. The best CART team of the past four years, Target Ganassi, has purchased Indy-legal cars for one shot by prodigy Juan Pablo Montoya and able veteran Jimmy Vasser. And there'll be two women in the field for the first time.

All of this brings back some effervescence but little substance to a race gone flat since Tony George -- the Speedway's mercurial and controversial president by inheritance -- created the still-struggling Indy Racing League and effectively ran off CART in '96 with untenable rules and conditions.

Unser, past his prime and unable to find a suitable CART ride for this season, reportedly is being paid $4 million a year by George to serve as poster boy at age 38. Unser has essentially become a one-man promotional tactic, and "is being over-marketed," Dyer said.

Montoya -- at 24, arguably the only current world-class driver in this year's field -- is not enthusiastically touted by the speedway because he is the darling of George's enemies, the barons of CART. Vasser, who led 35 laps of the last full-fledged running of the 500 in 1995, also is tacitly deemed an outsider by IRL hard-liners.

One woman, Sarah Fisher, has drawn national publicity, mostly because of her age, 19, and gender. Talented as she is, she likely would have had to undergo several more years of training before driving in the 500 if the IRL weren't combing the nation, desperate for drivers with some sort of public appeal. Lyn St. James is 53 and a long-struggling journeywoman. Her best Indy finish was 11th in her rookie year, 1992.

The rest of the field, for the fifth consecutive year, is made up mostly of no-name IRL drivers who couldn't cut it in CART, NASCAR or Formula One, and are to Indy what replacement players would be to the Super Bowl.

"I'm not sure the IRL-CART debacle is the whole problem," Dyer said. "The differential between the Indy 500 and other major U.S. races had been narrowing for the past 10 or 15 years anyway. It's not just because Indy has gone down, but because races at places like Daytona, Charlotte and Talladega have gone up."

Indy recovered from its previous declines. The race was canceled during both world wars, there was a dearth of competitive cars in the 1920s, and interest waned with the technological "junk formula" of the early 1930s.

But during all those times, there was no other major form of auto racing to rush in and fill the void. Open-wheel racing continues its suicidal divide just at the time when stock-car racing is gobbling up mainstream public interest in auto racing anyway.

"I think what CART and the IRL did was take a small but loyal group of racing fans and fractured it," said Mel Poole, president of the Charlotte-based Sponsor Logic marketing firm. "I think they each took about 40 percent of that group, and then they lost the other 20 percent to attrition or boredom or to NASCAR."

Even George says that "I firmly believe today that just getting back together isn't going to help the matter."

Worse, George believes that "it's more difficult with each day that passes to try and get the two series together."